Torment - Lauren Kate [83]
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Shelby. Luce shook her head and blinked a few times. Not just Shelby, but Miles, too. Both of them looked exhausted. Luce was exhausted. She glanced at her watch, not surprised by now to see how long she’d spent glimpsing the Announcer. It was after one in the morning. What were Miles and Shelby still doing up?
“Wh-What … what were you trying to …,” Miles stammered, pointing at the place where the Announcer had been. She looked over her shoulder. It had splintered into hundreds of shadowy pine needles that rained down, brittle enough to turn to ash where they landed.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Luce muttered, rolling to the side and aiming behind a nearby tree. She heaved a few times, but nothing came up. She closed her eyes, racked with guilt. She’d been too weak and too late to save herself.
A cool hand reached around and pulled her short blond waves back from her face. Luce saw Shelby’s frayed black yoga pants and flip-flopped feet and felt a wave of gratitude.
“Thanks,” she said. After a long moment, she wiped her mouth and unsteadily got to her feet. “Are you mad at me?”
“What mad? I’m proud of you. You figured it out. Why do you even need someone like me anymore?” Shelby gave Luce a one-shoulder shrug.
“Shelby—”
“No, I’ll tell you why you need me,” Shelby blurted. “To keep you out of catastrophes like the one you almost just threw yourself into! Willy-nilly, might I add. What were you trying to do? Do you know what happens to people who go inside Announcers?”
Luce shook her head.
“Me neither, but I doubt it’s pretty!”
“You just have to know what you’re doing,” Miles said suddenly from behind them. His face looked paler than normal. Luce must really have shaken him up.
“Oh, and I presume you know what you’re doing?” Shelby challenged.
“No,” he mumbled. “But one summer my parents made me take a workshop with this old angel who knew how, okay?” He turned to Luce. “And the way you were doing it? Wasn’t even close. You really scared me, Luce.”
“I’m sorry.” Luce winced. Shelby and Miles were acting like she’d betrayed them by coming out here alone. “I thought you guys were going to the campfire behind the lodge.”
“We thought you were going,” Shelby shot back. “We were there for a while, but then Jasmine started crying about how Dawn had disappeared, and the teachers got all weird, especially when they realized you were missing too, so the party kinda broke up. So then I mention casually to Miles that I kind of sort of have an idea what you might be up to and that I’m off to find you and suddenly he’s Mr. Superglue—”
“Wait a minute,” Luce broke in. “Dawn disappeared?”
“Probably not,” Miles offered. “I mean, you know how she and Jasmine are. They’re just flighty.”
“But it was her party,” Luce said. “She wouldn’t miss her own party.”
“That was what Jasmine kept saying,” Miles offered. “She didn’t come to the room last night, and wasn’t at mess this morning, so finally Frankie and Steven instructed us all to go back to the dorms, but—”
“Twenty bucks says Dawn’s mugging down with some non-Neph greaseball in the woods around here.” Shelby rolled her eyes.
“No.” Luce had a bad feeling about this. Dawn had been so excited about the campfire. She’d ordered T-shirts online even though there was no way in the world she’d be able to convince any of the Nephilim kids to wear them. She wouldn’t just disappear—not of her own volition. “How long has she been gone?”
When the three of them came out of the woods, Luce was even more shaken up. And not just about Dawn. She was shaken by what she’d seen in the Announcer. Watching death close in on her former self was agony, and this was the first time she had seen it. Daniel, on the other hand, had had to watch it hundreds of times. Only now could she understand why he’d been so cold to her when they first met: to save them both the trauma of going through another gruesome death. The reality of Daniel’s plight began to overwhelm her,